the voluntary, vigorous, and mystical act of getting out at Gower Street.
Decision is the whole business here; a door must be shut for ever.
Every remedy is a desperate remedy. Every cure is a miraculous cure.
Curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher; it is casting
out a devil. And however quietly doctors and psychologists may go
to work in the matter, their attitude is profoundly intolerant--
as intolerant as Bloody Mary. Their attitude is really this:
that the man must stop thinking, if he is to go on living.
Their counsel is one of intellectual amputation. If thy HEAD
offend thee, cut it off; for it is better, not merely to enter
the Kingdom of Heaven as a child, but to enter it as an imbecile,
rather than with your whole intellect to be cast into hell--
or into Hanwell.

Such is the madman of experience; he is commonly a reasoner,
frequently a successful reasoner. Doubtless he could be vanquished
in mere reason, and the case against him put logically. But it can
be put much more precisely in more general and even aesthetic terms.
He is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea: he is
sharpened to one painful point. He is without healthy hesitation
and healthy complexity. Now, as I explain in the introduction,
I have determined in these early chapters to give not so much
a diagram of a doctrine as some pictures of a point of view. And I
have described at length my vision of the maniac for this reason:
that just as I am affected by the maniac, so I am affected by most
modern thinkers. That unmistakable mood or note that I hear
from Hanwell, I hear also from half the chairs of science and seats
of learning to-day; and most of the mad doctors are mad doctors
in more senses than one. They all have exactly that combination we
have noted: the combination of an expansive and exhaustive reason